Abstract: With the Economy reform and innovation in China since 1980s, more and more people moved from rural areas to cities to seek opportunities. Now, there are more than 120 millions rural-to-urban migrants in China. They face many social and personal problems (such as separating from their family) in the city. Some studies reported that the migrants had more chances than non-migrants to engage in the high risk sexual behavior. The rural-to-urban migrants are becoming one of the mostly concerned targets in STD/HIV (Sexually Transmitted Disease/Human Immunodeficiency Virus) prevention in China.
The Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) has been applied as an effective theoretical foundation for STD/HIV prevention in West. However, PMT has not been tested in empirical studies in China. The objective of this study was to explore the high risk sexual behaviors of STD/HIV among rural-to-urban migrants and the prediction of the protection motivation (PM) to such behaviors. We made three hypotheses. First, the rural-to-urban migrants would have many high risk sexual behaviors. Males would have more high risk sexual behaviors than females. Second, there would be a significant relation between the fatalness of the sexual behavior and PM, i.e. the higher the fatalness of the sexual behavior, the higher intrinsic rewards, extrinsic rewards, and response costs, and the lower the perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, self-efficacy and response efficacy. Third, PM would predict the migrants’ high risk sexual behaviors.

Method
With a self-administrated anonymous questionnaire, 2201 participants who had been working on 14 occupations in Beijing for more than 3 months were asked to report the time of their first sexual behavior, multiple sexual partners in life, and within the past month, commercial sexual behavior, sexual behavior of their sexual partners, condom using, evaluation of severity of STD/HIV in China, knowledge of STD/HIV symptom and transmission, and PM appraisal. The participants were selected based on the officially reported occupation distribution of the migrant. The participants were ask to sign an informed consent before they filled in the questionnaire, and were paid for their work after they had finished the questionnaire.

Results
Data analysis showed that there were 904 rural-to-urban migrants who had some sexual experiences. Further data analysis suggested that: (1) migrants had many high risk behaviors: 67.4% had sexual behavior before marriage, 31.0% having multiple sexual partners in their life and 6.8% within the past month, 9.4% had commercial sexual behavior, and males’ high risk sexual behaviors were significantly more than females’; (2) PM significantly predicted STD/HIV high risk sexual behaviors, and higher sexual risk was associated with perceptions of higher extrinsic reward, Intrinsic rewards, response costs, and lower perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, self-efficacy and response efficacy,

Conclusions
PM can predict all of the high risk sexual behaviors such as the condom using, taking part in commercial sexual behaviors, the first time of the sexual behavior, the number of sexual partners and sexual behaviors of the sexual partner. The results indicated that PMT might be applied as a practical theory for prevention of STD/HIV high risk sexual behaviors among rural-to-urban migrants

Key words: rural-to-urban migrants, STD/HIV, high risk sexual behavior, Protection Motivation Theory